Businessmodel of Symphony

Customer Segments

Symphony has a segmented market business model, with three customer segments:

• General Public: The company offers a free version of its software for “personal productivity” purposes
• General Businesses: The company offers an enterprise-grade version of its software for companies, both large and small
• Financial Firms: The company offers a version of its software customized for sell-side and buy-side firms that enable them to maintain regulatory compliance ### Value Proposition

Symphony offers four primary value propositions: customization, convenience, risk reduction, and price.

The company’s solution offers customization by allowing users to enhance messages with rich editing, files, tables, and images. They can also personalize filters and alerts with hashtags, mentions, and cashtags.

The company’s solution creates convenience by providing daily statistics for user sessions (e.g., top users and messages sent per user), automatically adapting to sudden market peaks, and enabling customers to pin important chats, automatically create filters, and engage in bulk account creation.

The company’s solution reduces risk through the following features:

• End-to-end protection of all content and messages through customer-controlled keys
• PIN code and Touch ID protection for mobile phone conversation access
• Compliance assurance through proactive user warnings, organizational info-barriers, and firmwide expression filters The company offers a price value proposition. It charges $15 per user per month for access to its cloud solution, significantly lower than the $20,000 annual subscription charged by Bloomberg.

Channels

Symphony’s main channel for general public customers is its website, while it relies on its direct sales team for financial firms and other businesses. The company promotes its offering through its social media pages.

Customer Relationships

Symphony’s customer relationship is primarily of a self-service, automated nature. Customers utilize the service through the main platform while having limited interaction with employees. The company’s website offers self-help resources such as videos, product screenshots, and answers to frequently asked questions. That said, there is a personal assistance component in the form of phone and e-mail support. Customers for paid plans can track the progress of their customer service requests through their online account.

Key Activities

Symphony’s business model entails maintaining a robust software platform for its customers, which can be accessed online and through its mobile app.

Key Partners

Symphony has the following types of partners:

Developers – The company invites business/enterprise customers to apply for developer access to enhance their experience; they can create interactive modules and notification bots that can provide live updates from third-party services

Advertisers – The company invites third parties to advertise their content and services in the Symphony app store; current partners include Dow Jones, Selerity, and S&P Capital IQ

Key Resources

Symphony’s main resource is its proprietary software platform. It also depends on its human resources in the form of engineering employees to maintain the platform and customer service workers to provide support. Lastly, as a relatively new startup it has relied heavily on funding from outside parties, raising $166 million from 23 investors as of October 2015.

Cost Structure

Symphony has a cost-driven structure, aiming to minimize expenses through significant automation and low-price value propositions. Its biggest cost driver is likely sales/marketing expenses. Other major drivers are in the areas of customer support/operations and administration.

Revenue Streams

Symphony has two revenue streams:

Subscription Revenues – The company charges $15 per month per user for access to its “Financial Services” and “Business & Enterprise” plans

Advertising Revenues – The company charges partners a fee to advertise their offerings within its app